Crime and punishment fascinate. Overwhelming in their media dominance, they present us with our most popular television programs, films, novels, art works, video games, podcasts, social media streams and hashtags.
The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Crime, Media and Popular Culture
, a massive and unprecedented undertaking, offers a foundational space for understanding the cultural life and imaginative force and power of crime and punishment. Across five areas foundational to the study of crime and media, leading scholars from five continents engage cutting edge scholarship in order to provide definitive overviews of over 120 topics.
In the context of an unprecedented global proliferation in the production of images, they take up the perennial and emergent problems of crime's celebrity and fascination; stereotypes and innovations in portrayals of crime and criminals; and the logics of representation that follow police, courts, capital punishment, prisons, and legal systems across the world. They also engage new, timely, and historically overlooked categories of offense and their representations, including child sexual abuse, violence against women, and human trafficking. A series of entries on mediums and methods provide a much needed set of critical approaches at a historical moment when doing media and visual research is a daunting, formidable undertaking.
This is also a volume that stretches our understanding of conventional categories of crime representation. One example of this is homicide, where entries include work on the ever-popular serial killer but also extend to filicide, infanticide, school shootings, aboriginal deaths in custody, lynchings, terrorism and genocide. Readers will be will be hard-pressed to find a convention, trope, or genre of crime representation that is not, in some way, both present and enlarged. From film noir to police procedurals, courtroom dramas and comedies to comic books, crime news to true crime and reality TV, gaming to sexting, it is covered in this encyclopedia.